Caravan

Forty years ago I was but a callow youth and had only newly discovered this ‘Progressive’ thing. I was rather more into the heaviosity of King Crimson and Black Sabbath but I caught Caravan at the Implosion at the Roundhouse one Sunday – I was smitten and rushed out to buy ‘In The Land Of Grey & Pink’: it hardly left my record deck for weeks afterwards as I devoured every note, ringing chord and multi-layered construct and every subtle time change would see me desperately trying to work out “how did they DO that?”.
In the intervening time it has been the album I have gone back to more often than any other, simply because it represents, to me at least, an example of music that is played without commercial care and entirely for the joy of creating a musical masterpiece – one that succeeds in almost every way. This truly sounds like a band creating music from their hearts and souls and the knowledge of each others strengths and weaknesses, every foible and twitch countered and covered.

So I approached this re-issue with care. Steven Wilson – Porcupine Tree – has remixed a few of the tracks and Paschal Byrne remastered the album and you get a lot of the usual different takes and some BBC sound archive material in a 3 CD package.

I cued up the first track, ‘Golf Girl’, and awaited the inevitable disappointment of an old favourite completely face-lifted and generally fucked with .... NOT A BIT OF IT!
Pye Hastings reedy and wavery vocal came out as clean as you could wish, the keyboards were full-figured and Richard Sinclair’s bass just sublime. The trumpet that starts the track up and carries the theme into the vocal is brassy and deliciously cheesy and Richard Coughlan’s drums are perfectly placed across the mix. There is a flute skittering across the soundscape and a mellotron that suddenly sounds ‘right’ in the song’s context. It really was like meeting an old flame and finding that she had cleaned that little bit of lippy off her teeth, and smiled at you in THAT way once again.
Track after track rolled out and I could see where the mix had been cleaned up a little, probably because I am so familiar with the original, but the heart and soul of the music, the clever interplay between the musicians, the intensity of the performance – it was all there. I was hearing some of the music as though a curtain had been wafted away – I had always known these things were there but it was all a little .... more.

The new mixes from Steven Wilson are fine. He keeps the original soul but moves things around a little and it works pretty well.
You get the original version of ‘Nigel Blows A Tune’ which heads up the mammoth ‘Nine Feet Underground’ which took up side two of the original album and I must say it is interesting but I’d rather listen to the finished article but the live tracks from the BBC are very much as I remembered Caravan all those years ago and there are a couple of John Peel sessions featuring ‘Nine Feet Underground’ and ‘Feelin’, Reelin’, Squealin’’ that are well worth including.

For me, the most important thing was to get a new release of the original album and for it to be right and they have managed this, oh brother how they have managed it. I managed to fall in love with the album all over again and you don’t often get the chance to do that.